Fediverse is the closest thing to Usenet nowadays.
- text only
- lots of subboards about every interest imaginable
- barely, or completely unmoderated (therefore full of spam and troll posts)
- similar reply conventions
- the web interface is so barebones that most users are using external desktop/mobile applications to read and post on it
- ASCII/character art is widespread
[1] http://5ch.net/
Furthermore your post lacks both hilarious memes and funny one liners so I’m definitely not upvoting it lol.
But in defence of Reddit, the sheer breadth of content is impressive. Like /r/skincareaddiction over to /r/showerbeer (NSFW). And the content remains permanently available unless it's actively deleted by the poster or a moderator as opposed to being eventually forgotten by your chosen Usenet host.
A lot of the commercial usenet providers have at least a decade's worth of retention at this point for binary groups. They may have even longer retention times for the text groups. The only thing that would keep a post from being archived now is having the X-No-Archive: yes header in the message.
The hivemind exists everywhere, downvotes just make it quantifiable. It's depressing to see wrongheaded and inaccurate posts voted to the top, but at the same time it's an interesting insight into the herd mentality.
Something about that feels familiar, but I can't quite place it.